Droplet

[Andrew Rapp] sent in this project called Droplet. He’s been doing work with Xbees and Arduinos together and built this little toy. He describes it as “sort of like a Chumby”. It has built in services for Twitter, Google Calendar, News, Gmail, etc. You can download the full source code and plans on his site. His next planned revisions include possibly running it from a sheevaplug, making a nice case for it, and utilizing the unused pins of the arduino.

@peter Good suggestion. I wanted some sort of visual feedback that lets you know it’s doing something; the equivalent of the hourglass in windows. Possibly I could just blink a character in the top left corner instead.

I thing I forget to mention regarding cost, once you have the coordinator/gateway in place, you can add additional remote displays for relatively cheap. You could use a bare bones Arduino, like Modern Device’s RBBB (~$12) and logic shifters/3.3V regulator in place of the XBee Shield.

@mcgyver – funny thing is… I found Java to be more complicated then C. Plus mcgyver can run java on a paper clip on chewing gum.

@everyone else – yes, not sure how much space is left on the arduino but I would think there is enough for some more code. Grab an ethernet chip like ENC28J60 and you don’t need a PC. Maybe a flash chip for buffering and whatever else.